Wanted: Leadership At The Beach

Jim Spencer

The Virginia Beach Labor Day Review Commission spared no one in its critique of the 1989 Greekfest riots.

The scum who broke windows and looted stores near the oceanfront got it with both barrels.

"No amount of rationalization can excuse the behavior of those individuals who destroyed, looted and generally violated the bounds of decency that circumscribe the actions of all who live in a civilized society," the commission's members wrote in their recently released report.

On the other hand, the commission pointed out that instead of protecting people's property when the party turned ugly in the wee hours of the morning Sept. 3, the cops left the scene to put on riot gear.

"Break-ins commenced about 3 a.m. and were unimpeded by police for more than three-quarters of an hour," the commission stated.

Furthermore, while the commission decided that most police officers conducted themselves properly, there was some police brutality for which no one answered.

The revelers who attended Greek- fest didn't escape the commission's wrath either. They were scored for providing no organization to work with city officials to coordinate events and keep things calm.

At the same time, the commission decided that "the most important failure of city management was waiting until far too late to encourage or even to assist in activities for visitors it knew would arrive."

Those are all strong statements. But the commission reserved its most stinging criticism for its bosses - Virginia Beach Mayor Meyera Oberndorf and the rest of the City Council. In the report they come off as scared, indecisive, naive and, worst of all, out of control.

To hear the Labor Day Review Commission tell it, Greekfest 1989 sat like a broken beer bottle in the middle of Atlantic Avenue. Instead of trying to clean up the mess, the City Council tried to tiptoe through it and got cut.

You certainly can't call the commission's 21-page analysis of Greekfest a whitewash. But in some ways you could call it old news. It says what lots of folks said long before the riot-torn holiday weekend five months ago: Virginia Beach can't stop young black people from coming to town. Rather than try, city officials need to help them have a good time.

The troubles of the Labor Day weekend only confirmed that notion. When upward of 100,000 people are made to feel like gate crashers, they don't really care what happens at the party, because it's not their responsibility.

So the Labor Day Review Commission's report was not as revealing as it was refreshing. It was carefully written to bring people together, not tear them apart. It was intended to promote cooperation, not recrimination. But the political fallout of its honesty is inescapable: When the going got tough, the buck got passed.

Oberndorf and the council look like the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV - not just losers, but people way out of their league.

More than anything else, an absence of leadership caused the Labor Day Follies, the commission concluded. That begs the question of who should lead. Oberndorf and the majority of council members who addressed the Labor Day Review Commission ran scared. "We just set policy," they said. "We don't have anything to do with the day-to-day operations of the city. That's the city manager's job."

I'm not sure that cop-out would have fooled a high school civics class. With a commission that included, among others, a former congressman and a couple of university presidents, the politicians' excuses were exactly what they appeared to be:

Lame.

The commission politely but emphatically pointed out that the council set no policy regarding Greekfest 1989.

"We believe that City Council and the mayor should have been more active and should have exerted greater leadership in connection with Labor Day 1989," the commission said simply.

No revelation there. Greekfest 1989 didn't sneak up on anyone. Greekfest 1988 provided enough confrontations between blacks and police to let everyone know that race relations were shaky at the beachfront and that something had to be done.

And yet, according to the Labor Day Commission report, no one did much.

The city management "apparently made little or no effort in the months after Labor Day 1988 to communicate about Labor Day 1989 with colleges, universities, student governments, fraternities and sororities, although it had done so in previous years," the report said.

The city management and the NAACP "did not adequately follow up on initial contacts."

The Beachfront Events Committee, an advisory group put together to talk about the handling of big crowds, recommended some of the same things as the Labor Day Review Commission. Its report was submitted to the Virginia Beach city manager's office in mid-June. The report was ignored until August, when it was too late to make any difference.